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Sunday, September 11, 2011

After being run over by Nick Markakis on Thursday, Cervelli has been in the Yankees lineup two days in a row, only to be scratched each time. Girardi said Cervelli has some concussion symptoms, and he was sent for an ImPACT test tonight.

Or as Red O’Flush drooled out at the bar last night…“OMG! Fred Stanley meets Grady Little!”

The Red Sox held a nine-game lead over the Rays on Sept. 3. Based on coolstandings.com, which simulates the remainders of seasons one million times to determine playoff chances, Boston finished that day with a season-high 99.6 percent chance of making the postseason.

Essentially, the site’s engine calculated that if the rest of the season was played out a million times, the Red Sox would make the ...

The 20-year old, who had never played above Double A until he was promoted in early July. He hit just .163 with one homer and six RBI, but the Angels went 9-3 in the dozen games he started. Since his August 19th recall, he’s again started twelve times and the Halos have triumphed in eleven. Obviously he’s a player who can do everything on the field—offensively and defensively—and do it well. But how has he been able to have the ...

This is the land of Grace and Schilling and Bierbrodt. They won’t fall for that!

Johnson turned 48 on Saturday, and the change in his personality seems profound. Retirement has muted his legendary intensity. Time has soothed most of the anger he felt toward the organization, although he still hasn’t forgotten how they rebuked his offer of a 50 percent pay cut, forcing him to reach a treasured milestone (300 victories) and end his career in a different uniform (Giants).

Image of the Day usually only makes in-season appearance for special occasions or remembrances. And today, on the tenth anniversary of the 9-11-01 attacks, here is a picture of a memorial to the victims put up in Monument Park in old Yankee Stadium, which I presume was moved over to the new stadium as well.

Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel, “The Art of Fielding.” “You loved it,” he writes of the game, “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human ...

The Rangers trailed by five runs going into the bottom of the sixth before launching a comeback that fell one hit short in an 8-7 loss to the Athletics on Saturday afternoon at the Ballpark in Arlington.

LaHair credited Iowa hitting coach Von Joshua for changing his hand slot and helping renew his confidence. He hopes to be given a chance to make the Cubs in 2012, though the organization appears to be leaning toward re-signing Carlos Pena.

Dusty watch: Reds manager Dusty Baker said the hardest part of managing the Cubs was the lack of patience in Chicago.

“They keep reminding you of the 100 years,” he said, referring to the 103-year ...

Lee’s total of six complete-game shutouts leads the National League and is four ahead of the second closest pitchers, Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Jaime Garcia of the Cardinals, and two ahead of any other team’s total in the National League. A four-shutout lead is the biggest lead since 1988 when Roger Clemens led the American League with eight shutouts, four ahead of Greg Swindell, Dave Stieb ...

They’re getting so used to winning at home, the Diamondbacks won’t be satisfied with simply clinching the National League West.

Forget about the San Francisco Giants, who the Diamondbacks lead by a staggering 8 1/2 games. The Diamondbacks have their sights on catching the Milwaukee Brewers for the second-best record in the NL and the right for home-field advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

Forget about the magic number, which has quickly dropped to 10. Friday’s win over the Padres, ...

The Toronto Blue Jays’ latest foray into developing Canadian baseball at the grassroots level comes in the form of a scout school for a handful of coaches from the country’s top amateur teams this weekend at the Rogers Centre.

The two-day session, which kicked off Friday morning, is being led by amateur scouting director Andrew Tinnish and is both selfless and a touch selfish in motivation.

By divulging some of the club’s philosophies on both player evaluation and development, the Blue ...

Japanese baseball officials held negotiations in New York Thursday to demand a bigger slice of revenue to take part in the 2013 World Baseball Classic, but no agreement has been reached with organizers of the tournament.

Toshimasa Shimada, the head of international relations and other representatives of Japanese baseball, have requested that sponsorship rights and the rights to baseball memorabilia for the Japanese team be transferred to Nippon Professional Baseball.

...Most arguments, like most statistics, are flawed. Truth be told, I eliminated certain paragraphs from this column because I was contradicting myself. But that’s all part of the process, one that has ...

Former Orioles right-hander Jesse Jefferson died Thursday at age 62 of prostate cancer. He pitched for five major league teams, including the Orioles from 1973 to 1975. He was 7-7 with a 4.13 ERA in 42 games with Baltimore. He was a resident of Midlothian, Va

Bautista’s September eight-game hitting stats — .179 batting averag, .324 on base percentage and .321 slugging average are atrocious, but can easily be jettisoned due to small-sample-size bias.

His 88 August at-bats, however, are a much better barometer for highlighting the slugger’s concerning decline. In that month, he recorded a .261 batting average, while launching eight homers, but striking out 26 times, his highest monthly total of ...

Friday, September 09, 2011

The Glasscock Line? Wasn’t that Cynthia Plaster Caster’s first attempt?

So that gap in between Doerr and Grudzielanek is where things become truly impressive, where a baseball player can make the jump from long, pleasant career to something more. This shall be known as the Glasscock Line, after Pebbly Jack Glasscock, who finished 244th all-time with 2041 hits.

Above Glasscock, you have Hall-of-Famers and All-Stars, players whose posters you would have had on your wall as a kid, whose baseball ...

Jim Crane spoke publically to the Houston Chronicle for the first time yesterday since the mid-May press conference to announce the sales agreement to purchase the Astros. Crane approached the Chronicle in an attempt to address some of the issues swirling around his stalled approval by the league’s owners. It was a needed move, that on one hand, addressed direct issues around the EEOC, war-profiteering and divorce issues, while on the other hand, ...

Do these subtle biases add up? The authors make a compelling case that they do. One of the ways they do this is by analyzing the location of the pitches. They divide the area near home plate into three regions: probable strikes, probable balls, and an edge region between the two, where the call is likely to be largely based on the umpire’s discretion. Normally, just under 20 percent of pitches are thrown to that edge region. But, when an umpire is not being monitored (and thus more likely to ...

I knew pitchers 40 years ago regularly went deep in games and threw a lot of pitches, but McLain’s output in 1966 was staggering.

On Aug. 29, 1966, McLain threw 229 pitches in the Tigers’ 6-3 win over the Orioles. He gave up eight hits, walks nine and struck out 11 Orioles to notch his 16th win. According to the Baseball Reference.com box score, McLain faced 43 batters in the game.

Baseball is in danger of being like the Swiss watchmakers of old. Up until the 1970’s, the Swiss watchmakers dominated the market. When quartz technology first came on the scene, the Swiss were not concerned and continued to do business as usual. As Asia and American watch industries embraced this quartz technology, Switzerland continued to ignore it.

What ensued was a near collapse of the Swiss watch making economy. What was once known as the best ...

While [Rube] Marquard has not earned a great deal of money like some of the older players, he owns considerable property. His father and mother are both dead and he has no brothers or sisters. His parents left him a large farm at New Brunswick, O., 22 miles from Cleveland.

...

When the elder Richard de Marquis, a soldier of France, came to America and became engineer for the city of Cleveland he did not realize that in his son he was giving to Uncle Sam ...

Yeah, and the last time someone had high hopes in Florida they ended up with a hole in their head!

I do not say this to be a party pooper or a contrarian. And it is not because I have too little faith in the Rays or too much respect for the Red Sox. It is simply because I trust history. And history pretty much says it ain’t going to happen.

...This is the time of year when we begin talking about magic numbers for teams in contention. Okay, so Tampa Bay’s magic number is 27. That means, if the ...